Wednesday: lesson where every other horse had a freak attack and so Walker didn't have to work hard
Thursday: day off in light of my exhaustion
Friday: useless ride where we walked for 45 minutes
Saturday: a real ride with real work
Sunday: day off because I hurt my back
Monday: a quick ride in the indoor arena for 20 minutes
Tuesday: a day off because I'm swamped with school
Wednesday: a day off because I'm swamped with school
So as some of you may be able to guess, Walker has not had a lot of work over the past week. In fact, he's only had one real ride, and he hasn't even been worked at all since Monday. I knew that I would have to lunge him today, and I made a point of finding at least an hour to put aside to do so. I even naively hoped that I would be able to put in a little 25 minutes ride on him, but then school got crazy and I didn't hit the barn until later than originally planned. After that idea fell through, I decided that I would lunge him quickly (15 minutes) and hop on him bareback (15 minutes).
Then I hit the barn.
Already we were off to a bad start because besides not being worked since Monday, he was also apparently cooped up inside due to rain yesterday and today. I put a lead line on him and led him outside, and right away the head flew up and the nostrils starting flaring. I tried my best to lead him to the indoor arena without getting kicked, but I was seriously starting to think that things were going to get crazy.
I attached him to the lunge line and asked for a walk. Canter. He started to canter at top speed and continued to do so for the next 15 minutes without me asking for it. Now, Walker is normally a very lazy horse, and he normally has to be gently encouraged (i.e. smacked on the rump with a lunge whip) to pick up the pace to even a leisurely lope. But this was definitely a canter, a canter I had not seen him do since I first got him (in his crazy days when he had been cooped up for two months before being shipped to me and was an absolute maniac on the lunge line). Needless to say, riding him was out of the question - not because I was nervous, but because I didn't have time to get all the energy out of him AND ride. I am definitely glad that I didn't decide to just hop on him without lunging him though because I'm sure I would have eaten dirt.
Anyway, while Walker was making me dizzy on the lunge line, I had some time to think. Technically, I have only seen Walker in the summer. It's Fall now and already the horses (i.e. all the horses) are nearing that transition period where they go wacky when we move them to the indoor arena. It gets colder, their energy level goes up, and then we confine them to a small space for the better part of 8 months. Counter intuitive but completely necessary. I'll be curious if today was a teaser for what Autumn (and dare I say Winter) will do to my boy and how unmanageable he will become as the temperature drops to unreasonable extremes.
The second thing I noticed was that Walker was cantering on the wrong lead, quite fast, in a tight circle. I always lunge him on his bad side first (mostly because I get bored by the time I get to the second side and so that side usually gets done less). I noticed that he would canter on his bad side for awhile, do a flying lead change if he decided it was actually more comfortable to canter on the correct lead (impressive, by the way), and then eventually go back to his bad side. He is becoming adept at the counter canter to compensate for the fact that he dislikes his bad side, for which, frankly, who can blame him.
But this got me thinking about loping outside. I always talk about my frantic corner - the corner at the bottom of the arena which, when I'm loping on his bad side, we never manage to make. Now I'm wondering if he's actually barrelling down the long end of the arena on the wrong lead and finding that its physically impossible to make the turn, which is why he breaks out of the lope. The couple times I managed to force a couple strides out of him felt pretty choppy but I figured it was the fact that he was unprepared to make the turn (or simply finding it difficult). Now I'm wondering if it's simply because he's on the wrong lead. He has clearly become so smooth at counter cantering that maybe I'm not noticing. Besides, he switches his leads easily enough, and cantering on the wrong lead down a straight line wouldn't be nearly as noticeable. Now I'm going to have to pay special attention to that the next time we're out to see if that's the problem.
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